Originally Posted by redmanmark86

Hello Everyone,

Firstly let me say thank you for such an informative thread and all the tips on gaining TP's.

I am totally new to all this TP run business and having read back through I know you are all more willing to help if we have done our own research first so I have done my best, but have got myself totally stuck. After a lot of playing around I have sort of got use to the ITA Matrix Tool, we enough that it didn't just keep saying to me no results lol.

I'm planing to take my girlfriend on a surprise trip for her birthday to New York and figured I would try and make it into a cheeky TP run at the same time.

She is a child social worker and on duty that week which means she can finish late depending on how many emergency cases come in so I have to work around that. Her birthday is the 16th May so that is the day we need to fly to New York but looking at flights late evening on the 15th, returning the 19th which would get us back early morning on the 20th. She has the 20th off completely so have a lot more flexibility to try and maximise the TP's on the return leg. I don't fully understand everything I have read, but don't think it helps we are based in London when trying to plan a TP as the usual connecting leg would be XXX-XXX-LHR-JFK-XXX-XXX.

I've looked at various countries we could get to easily enough on the 15th and Dublin seems a good pick (I pretty much checked most of Europe) and I managed to come up with this which is actually cheaper then the same flight LHR to JFK for some weird reason by a good £1000.

16/05/19
DUB(J)-LHR(A)-JFK

19/05/19
JFK(A)-LHR(J)-DUB

£2686.65 PP

I did look at going to Helsinki on the return for futher TP's for a couple of hundred more but no matter what I do I have the same problem, If I add a flight to say London to Dublin on the 15th it says no flights found for the whole thing, If I tried to add a flight back on the ITA Matrix from Helenski on the 20th it will also say no flights found even though we would get into Helenski at 3.15pm on the A350.

I'm probably missing something obvious or haven't fully understood how to make full use of the ITA Matrix so any help is appreciated. The outgoing flight on the 15th would ideally need to be from LHR after 20:00 or near it and on the 20th May we just need to be back in London at a reasonable time of like 22:00 so she can get home and sleep for work the next day.

Thanks,

P.S. Sorry for such a long post, my first try at this so got into a bit of a rant.